Project Charter Ownership

As usual, I'm tring to catch-up on my reading.  Today I came across an interesting article on change management for projects.  It is good to see an article focusing on change management although the article did not go far enough to stress using change measures as a project performance indicator.

Anyway, as you can see by the title of this post, I'm not focusing on change management measures but rather the project charter ownership.  In this article, the author presented a case where an organization implemented a formalized process where project leaders prepared a one page outline of the project to summarize the project's value to the organization, the project outcomes, and the alignment of the project outcomes to strategic objectives.  This outline was then provided to the steering committee to evaluate current and proposed projects.

First of all, I like how this organization simplified a formalized project charter down to essential components that are used in the steering committee's project evaluation.  This one page outline reduces the overhead of a more detailed and formalized project charter so the project teams should be more likely to comply with the process.  Also, by providing a highly summarized format for the project charter, the steering committee will be able to quickly assess the projects and, due to the standardized outline, easily compare projects to determine which projects to fund.

My issue with this process is where the ownership of this project charter was placed.  The organization required the project managers to develop this outline.  I feel this ownership is misplaced.  This is a good opportunity to engage the project sponsor in the project.  It is the project sponsor that should be responsible for developing the simple project charter.  The sponsor should be responsible for identifying the value to the organization, the project goals, and the project alignment with the strategic objectives.  The project sponsor needs to own a part of this project charter and developing a simple one page project charter is a great opportunity to ensure the sponsor is involved in the direction of the project.

Perhaps I'm overreacting and the organization simply infers the project manager is responsible for this project charter document and it is implied the project sponsor is involved in developing the charter.  I just think the importance of engaging the project sponsor should be emphasized by placing ownership of this project deliverable with the project sponsor.